9/07/2008

And is that enough?

9·2·08"Baby, I need your loving. Got, to have all your loving.""There's love all around you.""What do you mean she's gone? –Like the wind."

Actually, to truly discuss our 'specialness' in the universe, we must first be clear what we mean by 'special'. Start where it starts.

"I'd like to double her entendre""You were the fake, I was the fool."

9·3·08"No matter what we do or eat or say. I wish I had known this all along.""Those with 'something to fall back on' invariably fall back on it.""The effect of a mass on spacetime can informally be described as tilting the direction of time towards the mass." –This is awesome.

How can this happen?There are a number of other questions completely overlooked: What is the importance of 'the institution of marriage'? It's not like married couples are the only viable firefighters or something really important. Marriage is an ancient tradition that has very little bearing on causal reality. The one valid argument I can imagine for marriage is as a formal statement of commitment. Which I think is wonderful. It's probably the only reason I would ever get married. It is a reason I would happily accept.

Know thine enemy.

Hey, why doesn't your 'almighty' just go ahead and strike me down yet? I've made an effort to blasphemize 'him'. I've tried to 'tempt' 'believers' into abandoning their faith. I consider 'him' to be the grandest bane on human existence of all time, so why doesn't he eliminate me already?

From an evolutionary point of view, sex is more important than life itself.

With respect to the election going sour, with McCain elected, and then through some unfortunate sequence of events, Palin becoming president, there is one comforting fact: Palin would most likely try to do something illegal and get in boat loads of trouble for it. Why would I think that? Because she is so religious, she is bound to break church-state separation in a legally defined way (for instance, by declaring our involvement in Iraq to be "god's plan"). More likely this belief is a good indicator that I legitimately losing my mind.

How about this: the VAST majority of conveniences in modern life are the product of scientific progress. Thousands of millions of years of genetic evolution has now given way to "conceptual evolution", whereby our ideas evolve through meme recombination and survival of the fittest, with 'fitness' being measured through repeatable, verifiable, scientific experiment.

The car you drive, the electricity you depend on, the medicine that is responsible for roughly 12% of us who would have died before our first birthday in a country like Afghanistan, and the computers that we are all using to discuss this are the direct result of this "conceptual evolution", which is more correctly referred to as science.

Science will prevail, it always has. The methods of science allow for increased rates of variation in ideas, which (like in genetic evolution), is a enormous advantage over ideas with low rates of variation (such as religion). Let's not forget the ideas of Galileo Galilei (and Copernicus and Kepler and Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive), were also resisted originally, but no significant group any longer believes Earth to be the center of the solar system.

All scientific knowledge is tentative, but the bigger theories, like Quantum Electrodynamics, General Relativity, the Standard Model, and Evolution, are such close approximations that to ever declare them 'wrong' is to convey gross ignorance of them. They are not perfectly right, but they are by far the closest to right we have ever seen.

The rate of scientific progress is directly related to how many people do and do not understand science. The more people who are ignorant of modern science, the slower the development of technology that improves everyone's lives will become. And I am not willing to abandon anyone. We are in this together.

The insidiousness of 'intelligent design' lies in it's denial not only of evolutionary theory, but in the very process of science itself, as science could be accurately described as the theory of evolution applied to human knowledge and abstraction thought; an analogy can be drawn from 'genetic evolution' to 'memetic evolution'. In order to reject the former one must be actively opposing the later.

I have a fear of religions. And it is my main motivation for involvement in politics? And I want to see a science class about the scientific process, rather than any particular science. It would be very similar to an evolutionary biology class.

What the hell is my problem?What am I supposed to do?Who do I turn to?Why aren't you here with me.

Because it is not a failed science. It never was a science in the first place. And it's not another side of an argument, or even an argument at all. It is an impostor that was created specifically to undermine a perceived threat to religious doctrine, based on belief that developed in the absence of any real knowledge of the subject, and the conflict is between people who are willing to make decisions based on objective evidence and people who consider belief itself to be evidence.

I see what you are saying, and I want to agree; it would be nice if we had such great science teachers that you could give people the unscientific explanations and then show that the scientific ones are superior and why, but I think that would open the door for people to misinterpret the presentation, much the way that people saying it was a debate created the debate in the first place.

I think abortion is a radically different issue: morals and beliefs have nothing to do with scientific knowledge beyond influencing our approach to probing the universe. Abortion being 'right' or 'wrong' is independent of scientific knowledge. Explanative theories such as evolution are independent of morals and beliefs.

As for us knowing the ridiculous ideas that preceded scientific investigation, it is not necessary information, that is to say that the history of science is not needed to understand science. It would probably be best to spend the time explaining what the problems and experiments and evolution of ideas was that lead to the modern scientific explanations. I should explain: beyond generating personal inhibition in Darwin, creationism had no bearing on the development of Evolution. The history of science is good to know insofar as it historical events contribute to the development of science. The fact that creationism has severely inhibited the progression of science.

Do I know how to do a min/max problem where the variable isn't continuous but rather discrete?

9·6·08Are crosswalks evidence of freemarket's shortcomings? Or even all traffic rules in general? Without government intervention, it may be very difficult to cross the street.

A greater question in biology, rather than 'why sex' might be, why the asymmetry? Why not the plantlike approach of every individual having both sexual organs? Was it just a matter of chance?

What if cosmic rays are generated by the vacuum of space? I know it sounds stupid, but we already have CMB, and we have vacuum fluctuations on the quantum scale. It seems our understanding could be seriously flawed. It sort of seems like it would resolve the oh my god particle dilemma.

Heaven adores you.

It went from hokey, to slapstick. In the first three movies, if there was a smartass comment, it was stated under his breath, or after an event. It did not interfere with the pacing of the action. As opposed to the fourth movie in which the pacing of the action takes a back seat to the jokes. The old movies were better at making the action a joke.

About Me

I enjoy untying knots. I have a deep and unfounded appreciation for all humankind.
What you see is what you get. Except for politicians. And relationships. And book covers. And land mines. And plot twists. And sink holes. And the media. And fashion. And of course ice bergs too.
I find more things than I should profound. I fall in love with every noun, but it is okay because it is not contagious. I am both deeply superficial and superficially deep.